Amith Prabhu: We need to showcase our PR Icons

13 Oct,2014

By Amith Prabhu

At the recently concluded ICCO Summit in New Delhi it did not feel good to not see the stalwarts of the Indian PR business around. At least those men and women from the consultancy business who are pioneers in their own right. They may have had their reasons to not be there, but ICCO is the global federation of country associations that represent PR firms.

We complain that we do not have people to gain inspirations from, in our profession. Our problem is we have not done enough reputation building for our profession. The generations to come will constantly need to look upto achievers and stalwarts.

The PRomise Foundation that Iâ€™m part of was created with that primary objective of doing PR for PR. We hope over the next 100 days we have a list of 100 important people in our profession that is publicly available. To help build that list I created a tentative list of 25 icons we can learn more about who I feel have contributed immensely to our field and still continue to do so.

The intention of this list was not to say that some people are more superior to the others. The purpose was to tell a new era of youngsters that there is much to look forward to, in what we do and there are at least 25 people we can learn from, right away. I have kept out expats from this list as the aim was to focus on Indians.

There are few others who are not on the list of 25 but will certainly feature in the Top 100. Some of them include Vinod Nair, Ashwani Singla, Nikhil Dey, Paresh Chaudhary, Ameer Ismail, Amrit Ahuja, Chetan Mahajan and the better halves at Adfactors (Rajesh) and Perfect Relations (Bobby) besides the Founders of Avian Media (Nikhil &Nitin) among others. I hope someone takes the trouble to profile these 25 individuals, so that the hundreds of professionals entering the business every year have a text book to emulate in the years to come.

Then there are few who retired few years ago including Sunil Agarwal, Sunil Gautam, Mehnaz Curmally, Veena Gidwani and Roger Pereira after running PR firms very successfully. They need to be profiled as well. Without further ado hereâ€™s my first list of 25 in random order.

I look forward to hearing from you as to who should feature in the list of 100 important people in Indian Public Relations besides the 35 names listed here. Names include those above the list in the paragraphs, so 35. The list of 24 includes the Rajan couple, hence 25.